This post is a recollection of the general session at Tuesday. If you missed the VMworld Europe 2013 general session you can watch it later at VMware Now, http://www.vmware.com/now

Maurizio Carli, Senior Vice President and General Manager EMEA, opened the general session with history about the company and some figures:

More than 8.500 attendees this year at VMworld Europe 2013 2008: first VMworld Europe (Cannes, France) Maurizio talked about the journey we are in right now.

After Marizion Pat Gelsinger takes the stage:

First we were in the mainframe age, central computing, central processing. After that we were in the client-server era. Now it is the challenge to liberate resources from the client-server world.

Today a large portion of the total IT budget is spent on ‘keeping the lights on’. Less than 30% is spent on IT innovation The infrastructure is brittle, management is hard

Luckily amongst VMware customers this percentage is somewhat better: 40% of the IT budget is spent on innovation The goal is at least 50/50 for IT as a Service. When more money is being spent on innovation business can be more agile and competitive.

There are millions of apps, each with their own, unique, requirements.

Who will lead the mobile-cloud Era? You A lot of comparisons were made between IT admins and: Gods, ninjas, full fighters, but eventually we see ourselves as champions. We conquer challenges on a daily basis. And let’s not forget who the people are for we do it all: The end users, IT’s most demanding customers.

Next Sanjay Poonen is invited on stage. Sanjay is the Executive vice president & General Manager End-user Computing at VMware. Sanjay makes a remark to the ‘cult-like following’ of the people working with VMware products.

The thing we all want is a virtual workspace, any place, any time, any device. The challenge is, as always, the end user freedom vs IT control.

What the enduser wants is: consistent access personal vs work data choice eventually ‘work and life balanced’

What IT wants is: fully automated policy driven centrally managed

Sanjay makes a short comment about the VMware Horizon View 5.3 announcement.

One of the most important quests the coming year is to make the cost of VDI the same or lower than the cost of a laptop. VMware bought a company Desktone, which delivers a Desktop-as-a-Service platform. from the press release: “Desktone is a leader in desktop-as-a-service and has a complete and proven blueprint for enabling service providers to deliver DaaS,” said Sanjay Poonen, executive vice president and general manager, End-User Computing, VMware. “By bringing Desktone’s innovative platform in house, VMware can accelerate the delivery of DaaS through its network of over 11,000 VMware service provider partners while helping to shape and lead the future of the industry.”

The solution: Networking Virtualization VMware NSX is the networking virtualization platform. It will change the model and flexibility of the networking.

To put it in a nutshell: What VMware ESX is to server virtualization what VMware NSX is to network virtualization. NSX does the same things as ESX, like rapid deployment, snapshotting, etc. without physical space, recabling.

why now? In 2010 the crossover between VM and physical servers happened. More virtual servers were commissioned than physical servers. Last year the total number of virtual network ports exceeded that of the number of physical ports, so again an important crossover.

A number of large companies are already busy with NSX, like Citi, eBay and GE.

Pat sets the definition from a VMware perspective for the hybrid cloud: seamless extension of your on-premise IT infrastructure existing & new apps with common management, common networking and common support

After all the announcements Bill Fathers,senior VP & general manager vCloud Hybrid Service, takes the stage. Bill showed some big customers for the vCloud Hybrid service that can extend your on-premise platform to the cloud when you need it. One of them was Harley-Davidson Dealer Systems. Because of the vCloud Hybrid Service they shaved of couple of months of their project timeline for implementation of a new web frontend for the dealers.

Bill also gave some Europe specific announcements for the vCloud Hybrid Service, since Europe has specific demands on legal and privacy .

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Anne Jan Elsinga

Anne Jan Elsinga is a Technical Account Manager for VMware. In the past he worked as presales and technical consultancy and architecture for several systems integrators. From 2009 until 2017 he was awarded with the VMware vExpert status. In the night time he dances latin, ballroom and salsa and he also discovered the pleasure of diving and woodworking. Recently he started blogging about smart homes and comfort in general.